Commentary on Exodus 33:12-23

This passage is part of an arc that begins in the previous chapter with the golden calf, whose worship voided the covenant document which Moses brought down the mountain and smashed in fury at the sight of the revelry (Exodus 32:19). As a result, the people become a “hot potato” which neither the Lord nor Moses wants to be caught holding: The Lord calls them Moses’s people (32:7), but Moses avers that the people are the Lord’s (32:11, 12). This tension continues to saturate Exodus 33, which begins with the Lord once again asserting that the people are Moses’s responsibility (verse 1) but also promising a divine messenger to go before Moses (verse 2).

Our passage contains what appears to be a dialogue between Moses and the Lord, often described as “Moses’s intercession” (so the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition’s heading): Twice Moses speaks at relative length (verses 12–13, 15–16) and is answered by brief divine replies (verses 14, 17), and then there is a final exchange where Moses makes a brief request (verse 18) and the Lord replies at length (verses 19–23). The conversation, if we can call it one, lurches unevenly.

When we read closely to try to follow a train of thought, the cars do not seem well connected:

• For Moses’s part, he keeps reminding the Lord of the people: “This people” (verse 12), “this nation is your people” (verse 13), “us” (verses 15, 16), and “I and your people” (twice in verse 16). The Lord’s replies ignore the people, addressing only Moses with the second-person singular “you.”
• In verse 12, there is a non sequitur: Moses alludes to the Lord having said “I know you by name and you have also found favor in my sight,” phrases which the Lord speaks for the first time in inverted fashion five verses later as “you have found favor in my sight and I know you by name.”
• In verse 13, Moses’s logic is circular: “If I have found favor … show me your ways … so that I may … find favor.”
• In verse 14, there is another non sequitur: The Lord promises, “My presence will go with you,” but in the very next verse, Moses says, “If your presence will not go …”
• In verse 18, Moses requests to be shown (literally “cause me to see”) the divine presence (Hebrew kavod), but it is not clear whether or how the Lord’s reply satisfies his request, which anticipates the following:
  (1) that the divine goodness will pass before Moses (verse 19a),
  (2) that the divine name will be uttered (verse 19b),
  (3) that grace and mercy will be shown (verse 19c), and
  (4) that Moses will experience a divine appearance (theophany), albeit one that is not face-to-face (verses 21–23).

The attentive reader and hearer will be hard-pressed to understand how Moses’s intercession (if that is even what it is) is effective or comprehensible. 

Perhaps the incoherent, disorienting texture of this human-divine interaction is typical and intentional. The Bible’s laconic narrators often leave us with unresolved questions, and this passage is a good example of one that defies readers’ attempts to gain control. We might also compare the inscrutability of Jesus’s encounter with the woman seeking healing for her daughter (Matthew 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30), another set of passages that resist easy mastery.

To use a musical analogy, Exodus 33 comprises transitional measures of disjointed counterpoint that bridge chapter 32’s frenetic festivities and dissonant chords of shattered tablets (verse 19) and chapter 34’s coherent reprise of the theme of relationship.

To proclaim Exodus 33 is to wrestle with the tensions found in both our individual and our communal relationship with God. Among other things, we may acknowledge that:

• God does not always share our perspectives (verses 12–16; compare Isaiah 55:6–11 and Psalm 103);
• We are forgetful and sometimes illogical creatures (verses 13, 14; compare Deuteronomy 4:9 [and frequently in the book] and James 1:22–25); and
• God does not always answer our prayers or fulfill our dreams in the ways we want or expect (verses 18–23; for example, contrast the contexts of Joseph’s dream in Genesis 37:6–7 and its fulfillment 22 years later in 43:26).

Each of these themes can be developed to show that they are hard, but good, truths. Each can lead us toward greater trust in God’s plans over our own understanding. And through the passage, we hear repeated notes that sow trust and strengthen relationship: favor (five times, Hebrew hēn), presence/face (four times, Hebrew panim), glory (twice, Hebrew kavod), and sight (five times, Hebrew ʿênayim).

It is perhaps notable that the description of the divine appearance in verses 21–23 is couched in the future tense (“you shall stand … you shall see”), its realization assumed and not recorded. The language of the glory “passing” (Hebrew ʿavar) calls to mind the scene in 1 Kings 19:11–13 when Elijah experiences the Lord “pass by” (same verb) not in powerful natural phenomena but in “a sound of sheer silence” (verse 12). 

Taken together, these passages suggest that God’s presence is known not in straightforward or linear ways but in indirect and unexpected ways, like One who refers to himself as the Son of Man (for example, Mark 2:10) and comes not in glory but in weakness (2 Corinthians 13:4).